


Inside the Dog's Mouth

by fourthduckling



Category: Dead Like Me, Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Conversations, Crossover, Delusions, Gen, George Lass - Freeform, Hospitals, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-18
Updated: 2013-07-18
Packaged: 2017-12-20 13:19:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/887748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourthduckling/pseuds/fourthduckling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wants to have really been George Lass. Georgia Madchen is a stranger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inside the Dog's Mouth

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to TaraFarago, my great beta. Thanks also to my brother, for giving me the idea.

_She receives another post-it note, but even as she’s looking at it, the name begins to fade. The ink leeches out until it’s blank yellow. What does a blank post-it note mean? She stares at it until the yellow becomes so bright, she’s afraid she’ll burst._

The light explodes as she wakes, or stops deluding herself. She's not sure which. She's never sure now. 

"How are you feeling?” The sound is hollow.

She doesn’t exactly feel like herself. Not like herself at all. She moves her fingertips, touches them against each other and the sensation is unbearable.

“Can you hear me?” The sound of flesh on glass and she looks up to see the man whose name she's sure had been on that little post-it note. He’s worn, like an old sweater, grown soft and fraying at the edges. His eyes are sunken, like two dark, harried spots in his face. Looking at him is painful, as if he once hurt her. She doesn't want to think that maybe it was she who damaged him.

 “Georgia,” he says, his breath fogging the glass, “Georgia, do you know me?” 

She blinks in response, because her neck is stiff, and she doesn't want to move it just yet. His face had been resting near hers and his hand had been reaching for her. In the other world-- _where her sister hung a tree full of toilet seats_ \-- he had been under her bed. “Yes,” she says, though her voice is a croak. She remembers the shape of his name disappearing into yellow, but she can’t pronounce it. Her tongue is heavy in her mouth.

He looks relieved, sags everywhere like he’s been holding his breath for her answer. “How are you feeling?” he asks again.

She wants a waffle, can taste the syrup sweet on her tongue. She wants to sit next to Daisy and complain to Delores and crash on Mason’s couch. She wants Rube to tell her to do her job, wants to hear Roxy snap something kind and bitchy at the same time, and she wants to feel dead again. She wants to have really been George Lass. Georgia Madchen is a stranger.

It was comfortable in a weird way having been hit by a toilet seat from a space station and having her life just _stop_. When she was dead, things were real in a distant sort of way. It was the directed, orchestrated, beautiful life of undeath. She was the last note in a symphony, she had a defined place in the world. Now everything she’s done is filled with the messy consequences of living. It vibrates in her like a jittering sun, ready to explode into fire. She doesn’t want to know what she really did. How many people she actually killed.

She doesn’t want to know that she was really a graveling.

“It hurts,” she says.

“Yes,” he says, leaning against the glass. “It does.”

They remain silent for a while, the man fiddling with his hospital wristband. He has an unfocused look about him, as if he’s traveling inside his own head to places she can’t see. Georgia concentrates on touching her fingertips, and ignoring the sharp pains that muddle their way through her medication. She wonders when he’s going to leave, and what his room in the hospital looks like. Does he have flowers? Balloons? A window that overlooks the parking lot? Does he have visitors, or-- like her-- a guard?

"The doctors say you're getting better." The man smiles as if it's some kind of a joke. "They say I'm getting better, too." He sways slightly and she can see his sleeve creeping up from leaning heavily on the glass.

"I don't feel better," Georgia says honestly. "I feel worse."

The smile he gives is like a gaping hole. "I know."

"I thought--" she begins and then stops. _She can taste syrup, can smell Kiffany's perfume, can see the yellow of the sticky note and the black smudge of his name in ink, though she still can't read the actual letters of his name._ "I got hit by a toilet seat."

He blinks at her incredulously.

"From a space station," she says. It sounds stupid now, coming out in this flat, heavy little tube. It sounds like something a child would dream up. "A toilet seat fell from the Mir space station and hit me on my first day of work." Her mouth hurts, aches at the corners. "That's how I died."

His face softens, and he appears to focus on her. "Your mother did say your first episode was when you were nine."

"I had a mother, too. And a sister. I thought." She should want to cry, but she just feels numb. "I had friends, and a job, and ... well, not a home, but something close." _The plastic seat warm under her, the hot glare of the sun reflecting off a car, the smell of coffee and the taste of syrup._ She takes a breath to steady herself and tries to remember that her name is Georgia, not George. "I had a frog."

The man looks so sad that she feels sorry for him. 

"I guess it wasn't real," she says, feeling uncomfortable.

They're silent under the dim lights, thinking about the life she never really had. Georgia tries to ground herself in the moment, following the line of the man's IV from the drip trailing down the tube and into his arm. She travels this route fifteen times, clearing her head. The air is filled with the soft hiss of oxygen filling her tank, the hum of diagnostic machines, and the distant sounds of footsteps in the hall.

"There's a stag," the man says suddenly, as if he's just remembered. " And a ghost. But not..." He closes his eyes as if he can still see it. "I can't tell if it's a metaphor or if I'm just crazy." He stops and swallows, takes a deep breath and opens his eyes, meeting her gaze. "I'm sorry. The medications they have me on are making me feel sick."

"Then you should go and rest." The softly accented voice is not Georgia's. She turns her head slowly, fearing that her skin will crack and open. There's another man standing at the open door. He is taller than her worn-out friend, a sleek arrow of a human being in a charcoal grey suit. He, too, is familiar. "It won't do to get yourself even sicker, Will," he chides Georgia's friend. 

The suited man moves into the room, right up to the other side of her tank so that she's bracketed by them.

"I'm perfectly fine," Will says, looking irritated and resigned in the dull glow.

"Now, I think we both know that's not true. Or else you wouldn't be here," the suited man says. "It's advisable that you take advantage of the hospital's restful atmosphere while you can."

Will's heavy sigh fogs the glass. "Don't you have other patients to see to, Dr. Lecter?"

Georgia turns her head so fast she hurts her neck. She can feel the rip and tear of her fragile skin, but it doesn't matter. She stares up at the suited man, the line of his nose, the sharp angle of his cheekbone, trying to keep calm.

"For all intents and purposes, you are still my patient," Dr. Lecter says. He looks Georgia over, and something in his face changes. "As long as you don't mind my interrupting your conversation." He doesn't smile so much as let the guard on his face relax ever so slightly. It's like opening a dog's mouth to see a wolf inside.

The name on the yellow post-it wasn't Will at all. Wasn't anything close to it. It had been a strange name twisted out of syllables that made some kind of awful sense to her. The man who should have taken her place. The man whose death should have meant her release from being undead-- _she's still in the diner, she can still taste the syrup_.

"Of course," she says, voice only wavering slightly, "Dr. Lecter."


End file.
